Textpattern Support Forum

Els/Rick/Bloke:

After thinking about it over the weekend, I believe that if the project proceeds I am going to go El’s route. If you guys can take a look at the below structure and let me know if you see any red flags I would appreciate it.

1. I am going to have the properties enetered into the system as Articles. The properties will be assigned a section called Properties.
2. I am going to have the rental periods entered into the system as Articles. the Rental Periods will be assigned a section called Rentals.
3. When a rental is booked, the end user will: (1) Create an article for the Rental putting the the Rental Confirmation Number in the title (2) Use the start and stop dates for the article as the booking period (3) Use the category field to select the property that the rental is for.
4. When viewing the actual property, I will filter the calendar by the Category Field so that the rentals for that particular property are the only ones that are displayed.

One issue I had was ease of use for the end user. I am going to assign a log in group that is just for people who are doing the rentals. They will only see the Rental Articles. This should make it friendly for the end user. They should also be able to easily input the information since there will only need to be a couple of fields to be filled in.

Guys, please let me know if you see any issues with the above structure.

Thanks.

progre55

Bloke:

Thanks for the quick response.

You are correct, creating new properties will be a bit cumbersome, unless I can figure out a smoother system. for the immediate need, the properties are fixed.

All the cleverness credit goes to Els. I was thinking of tackling it a differnt way until he opened my mind up to this possibility.

Can you please explain a little about the first bullet point. I did think that another alternative was to use the sections as the filter. By doing this, I would have a seperate section for each property and then have the Property and Rentals share the same section. do you think this maybe a better approach? Would this be smoother and more legant?

progre55

progre55 wrote:

All the cleverness credit goes to Els.

Yeah, when she showed me what she’d done on that booking site of hers I was like “wow, never thought of using the calendar like that” and it immediately sparked off some more ideas for the plugin. If there was a Textpattern Innovations award I’d nominate Els :-)

Can you please explain a little about the first bullet point.

I think you might run into trouble with using the default category but now I think more about it I’m not sure. If you are in section properties and viewing site.com/properties/23-acacia-drive then you are looking at an Individual Article. As soon as you try and view a category site.com/properties/?c=23-acacia-drive you are in an Article List context.

Thus, you will have to be clever about the way you view articles and will have to make sure you only show “1 article” when in the properties section, regardless of the category you are viewing. It is made more awkward by the fact the category contains the property name (aka the url title) so you have to extract that from the URL and show the correct article if using TXP’s default ?c= system.

Using a dedicated URL variable means that you never view the articles themselves by category as it is solely used by the calendar for organising content. The fact the variable you choose happens to represent a TXP category is immaterial. By using a different variable, TXP itself will not try and be clever and switch from Individual article to Article List context as you navigate from your property list to an individual property.

Your second thought of putting them all in one section might work insofar as the category then might work more easily (or maybe not…!), at the expense of having to maintain a list of sections. Can you not use cat2 (or a custom field radio set via glz_custom_fields) as the “type” of property (e.g. rent or buy) and filter using that? Hmmm, that probably doesn’t help either.

The fundamental problem here is that you are having to create two articles to represent — in effect — the same property, which smells hacky to me. There has to be a better way but I can’t figure it out right now. Would it help if the date ranges were in the calendar plugin so you could have one “property” and use the extrafield to list when it is rented out e.g. 21-feb-09 TO 28-feb-09, 5-mar-09 TO 8-mar-09?

EDIT: mind you, with only 255 characters in a custom field, it’s going to get pretty tight in there and you’ll have to keep revisiting properties to remove rental dates that have passed just so you have enough space to store dates that are coming up.

Last edited by Bloke (2009-02-23 15:11:32)

Bloke:

I agree with the fundamental problem, but because the plug in allows me to filter by section, I thought that when looking at site.com/properties/23-acacia-drive if in the form I had the calendar set for “section=“23 Acacia Drive” I would be in good shape.

Now I know that the property would also fall in the event calendar (since it would be in the same section, but I will just bury it in the past.

The date range in the extrafield, which was my original approach, is not feasable (the more I thought about it) because it would be almost unmanageable from the end users point of view even if the plug in could accomidate it.

progre55

progre55 wrote:

when looking at site.com/properties/23-acacia-drive if in the form I had the calendar set for “section=“23 Acacia Drive” I would be in good shape.

Yeah that should work as long as you don’t have clickable links from the already-booked events themselves; otherwise they’ll point to site.com/23-acacia-drive/url-title instead of site.com/properties/23-acacia-drive, unless you do some clever rewriting or a bit of jiggery pokery when creating the calendar cells.

The date range in the extrafield… would be almost unmanageable from the end users point of view even if the plug in could accomidate it.

OK, no probs. It needs doing so I’m going to try and get it working anyway.

Just a random thought, how about:

1. setting up the properties as normal in their own properties section
2. setting up a rentals section
3. whenever a property is rented, create a new article in the rentals section with the name of the property in the url-title. The start and end dates of the article are the start and end of the rental period
4. on your calendar, fix it to look at the rentals section and just write a conditional that says “if the url-title of the event in the current cell is the same as the url-title of the current property then display the event”

The downside is that TXP will complain that you have several articles with the same name when you save them (it allows this; it just warns you).

Alternatively, tell the end user to create a new article with some other unique info in the url-title (it could be anything, property code, dates, what they had for breakfast, whatever: you’ll never see it) and have them enter the property name in custom1. You can then do the same “if” logic but compare custom1 in the event with the individual article url-title.

If the end user has to type in (or select) the property name whether they are picking from a dropdown category list, a dropdown select list or typing it in a url-title / custom field you might as well use the custom field to “tie” the two records in the two sections together.

Even better (and less prone to error perhaps) than using the property name would be to use a property code utilising some naming convention that you devise, e.g. 23 acacia drive is 0023-aca-dri. As long as the person creating the Property in the first place ensures that the url-title of the article uses the property code and then every time it is referenced from the rental articles you use the same code, everything gels nicely.

Like I say, just a thought. It may or may not have legs.

Last edited by Bloke (2009-02-23 15:58:33)